British citizens who want a new passport are told to look straight at the camera and keep their mouths shut
From Newsweek, a great Bruce Schneier interview.
You can imagine living in a community where the landlord keeps hornets’ nests, and he keeps whacking the nests. And then he keeps telling you, you need to buy protective clothing. He’s right, but I wish he’d stop whacking the nest. In a sense that’s what we are doing.
Anyone who has copied songs from a CD onto an iPod or computer hard drive has fallen foul of Australian copyright laws, which critics argue are failing to keep pace with technological change. Copying music for personal use is generally okay in the US and Europe. But not in Australia — via BoingBoing
An ICANN arbitration panel has rejected Google’s challenge of a Web site named Froogles.com, meaning that the Froogles.com name will remain with the current owner. Also, the current owner is opposing Google’s attempt to register Froogle with the US Patent and Trademark Office, contending the mark would be an infringement of his Froogles.com mark. Google has filed 18 domain name disputes at the ICANN panel, challenging names like googlesex.com
, google.biz
and googleme.com
. It has won every challenge but Froogles.com
ACLU have an excellent piece of short speculative fiction presented as a flash animation depicting pizza ordering in a near-future United States — via boingboing
Revelations on the ABC-TV program Media Watch last night that the national broadcaster has taken a policy decision to require documentary makers to seek permission from politicians who feature in news reports prior to selling or licensing the clips reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the laws of copyright
Fairfax’s literary editor Malcolm Knox has accused Norma Khouri, the author of Forbidden Love
, of fraud. Ms Khouri’s book, Forbidden Love
, tells the story of her best friend, a Jordanian woman, who was murdered by her father for falling in love with a Christian man. Ms Khouri says she fled Jordan after the incident, writing the story and making her way to Australia. Mr Knox claims he has proof she lived in America for most of her life and only lived in Jordan until she was three
Pilgrim, a supplier for Kentucky Fried Chicken, suspended a worker without pay and is investigating three others after an animal rights group released video of workers kicking, stomping and throwing birds against walls at a West Virginia plant
Charleston City Council apologised to two protesters who were arrested for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts to the president’s 4 July rally at the West Virginia Capital — via Meta-Roj Blog
Law enforcement agencies that have been using a reverse white pages
directory found to breach Telstra’s copyright will face a more cumbersome and expensive procedure each time they search for details of phone number owners. Melbourne-based Desktop Marketing Systems, publisher of a reverse-white-pages CD-ROM, is winding up after losing a legal battle with Telstra
Goldfish could be banned as prizes at fairs and children prohibited from buying pets under a new UK draft animal welfare bill. Ministers believe children under 16 are not mature enough to have pets
A group of media and technology companies, including Microsoft, Disney, IBM, Intel, a Warner Bros, have agreed in principle to allow consumers to make legal backup copies of next-generation video discs and share their content on portable devices
Loony fundie US conservatives have failed in their bid to change the American Constitution to ban gay marriage. The retarded monkey boy had urged Congress to support a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage after several states moved to make it legal. But the proposal failed to win enough support in the Senate. The head of the human rights campaign, Cheryl Jacques, said: Today we saw President Bush and the Republican leadership attempt to divide America and it backfired
. Michael Organ gave the finger to the fundies who are trying to same stunt locally
The rights and wrongs of using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on humans have been debated since the tracking tags reached the technological mainstream. Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school. The tags will be read by readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the kids’ movements. The chips will be put onto kids’ schoolbags, name tags or clothing in one Wakayama prefecture school. Denmark’s Legoland introduced a similar scheme last month to stop young children going astray
Charles Green, a would-be novelist, was doing a crossword puzzle during his flight, and scribbled a line of dialogue in the margin: I know this is kind of a bomb
. It seems his terminally stupid seatmate panicked and dobbed him in. When they landed, Mr Green was accosted by police, and now is on Homeland Security’s watch list — via HogBlog
San Francisco talk show host, Katherine Fettke, has filed a lawsuit against McDonald’s, accusing the world’s largest fast-food restaurant company of failing to switch to healthier lower-fat cooking oil as it had pledged
Italy is finally cracking down on the many fickle pet owners who dump their cat or dog on the roadside as they head to the beach for their summer vacation
The Thailand-Australia Free Trade Agreement gives corporations the power to sue government, in either domestic courts or through international arbitration, riding over democracy
Body artists in Delaware who want to go beyond tattooing and piercing soon may risk a serious tongue lashing by a judge if they don’t consult with their doctors first. A bill approved by the state Senate on Tuesday prohibits the practice of tongue splitting unless it is done by a licensed doctor or dentist. Considering the complete cluelessness of doctors and dentists on body modification procedures, I shudder to think of the complete bollocks they’ll make of it — via boingboing
Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that ISPs do not have to pay royalties to composers and artists for music downloaded by web customers. Companies providing wide access to the web are merely intermediaries
who are not bound by Canadian copyright legislation, the court said in a 9-0 ruling
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